Jennifer Egan: Rewiring the Real (Conversation at Columbia, 2/7)

Columbia University is sponsoring a conversation with the author Jennifer Egan. Read on for an event description and links to further information.

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Jennifer Egan: Rewiring the Real

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012, 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm
International Affairs Building, Room 1501
420 West 118th Street

A conversation with Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit From the Goon Squad as well as Look at Me and The Keep. Moderated by Willing Davidson, fiction editor of The New Yorker.

Rewiring the Real is a yearlong series of conversations with writers about the interplay of literature, technology and religion, including Mark Z. Danielewski on April 24.

Internship Opportunity Through Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Spring 2012

Guantánamo Public Memory Project
Research Internship Spring 2012

About the Guantánamo Public Memory Project
“Guantánamo” has become an international symbol of torture, detention, national security, and conflict over America’s “War on Terror.” After more than a decade of bitter struggle over whether and how to “close Guantánamo,” in 2011, nearly 200 prisoners remain at the US naval station, or GTMO. The unique qualities of the site – its legal ambiguity, political isolation and geographic proximity, and architectures of confinement – have been used and reused for a wide range of people and purposes. These include Cuban workers in exile after the Revolution; Haitian refugees with HIV, first welcomed as asylum seekers but then confined in tent cities as threats to public health; and the War on Terror’s “enemy combatants.” GTMO and its residents have been inextricable, if often invisible, parts of America’s deepest policy conflicts: immigration, public health, human rights, and national security.

The Guantánamo Public Memory Project seeks to build public awareness of the century-long history of the US naval station at Guantánamo, Bay, Cuba, and foster dialogue on the future of this place and the policies it shapes. The Project will collect stories, documents, photos, videos artwork, and oral testimonies from different perspectives and time periods throughout GTMO’s 100 year history. It will bring that material to the public through a website, traveling exhibit, curriculum, public programs, and other media. The Project will also invite diverse people to share their own stories of GTMO and engage in debate about the larger issues this site and others like it across the world raise. It originated as a project of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, which currently serves on the Steering Committee for the Project. The Project is now being developed by a growing collaboration of universities and organizations, coordinated from Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights as part of its Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability.

About the Position
Researchers will identify and compile primary and secondary source material on GTMO’s history in a variety of media to serve as the foundation for an exhibit opening December 2012 and a curriculum to be used starting September 2012. The exhibit and curriculum have been divided into themes/subject areas. For each, researchers will:

• Compile a packet of material, including secondary sources that provide background on the subject, articles, websites, images, video footage, oral histories and candidates for interviews.
• Research, price, and secure permissions for images and any other material that requires it.

In addition, researchers will:

• Conduct research for rapid response to events in the media (anniversaries; histories of particular camps; historical perspective on new decisions) as necessary.
• Report regularly to other members of the Project team (other historical researchers, oral historians, bibliography developers), coordinating searches and sharing material as necessary.

Qualifications

• Ability to commit at least 10 hours/week for at least one full semester
• Graduate student in history, public history, museum studies, education, American Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, or related field
• Background and research experience in one or more subject areas related to GTMO’s history, such as 19th/early 20th century American imperialism, Caribbean studies, refugee policy, military history, Cold War
• Knowledge of Spanish or Haitian Creole a plus
• Excellent organization skills and ability to work independently and creatively

How to Apply
Please send resume and cover letter to guantanamo@columbia.edu

The deadline for applications is December 16, 2011.

Institutionalizing Interdisciplinarity conference Saturday, 11/12/11

Institutionalizing Interdisciplinarity | Saturday, November 12, 2011
301 Philosophy Hall

Program:

9:00am-9:30am | Welcome and Breakfast

PANEL 1: "Edutecture CU Teachers College Collaborative"
9:30am-11:00am
"Edutecture: Post-Representiationalist Design as Post-Modern Praxis."

CU Teacher's College collaborative
Blake Victor Seidenshaw (Interdisciplinary Studies in Education, Teachers College, CU)
Victoria Netanus (Sociology and Education, Teachers College, CU)
Chris Moffett (Philosophy and Education, Teachers College, CU)
Monica Patrice Barra (Cultural Anthropology, Graduate Center, CUNY)
David Backer (Philosophy and Education, Teachers College, CU)
Ethan Jucovy (Independent Scholar)

PANEL 2: "Interdisciplinarity Between Art and Science"
11:00am - 12:30pm
Disscussant: Jay Gundacker, History

John R. Blakinger, UC Berkeley
Models for Art and Science Collaboration:
Gyorgy Kepes at MIT and the Rise of Cold War Interdisciplinarity in the Visual Arts

Matthew Ramirez, UC Berkeley
Towards a Physiology of Drama: Plot Algorithms with Applications in Playwriting, Interactive Drama, and Collaborative Filtering

Robert Lewis and Matthew Luckett, Michigan State and UCLA
Cowboy morality in historical mass media: Barriers to an interdisciplinary investigation of dime novels and westward expansion

12:30pm-1:30pm | Lunch

KEYNOTE LECTURE
D. Graham Burnett presenting with Artist Lisa Young
1:30pm - 2:30pm

"In Lies Begins Responsibilities: Parafiction and Interdisciplinary Practice"

D. Graham Burnett is a professor of History, Princeton University and Editor, CabinetMagazine
Discussant: Marwa El Skakry, Associate Professor, Department of History

PANEL 3: Historical Interdisciplinarities and Interdisciplinary Histories
2:30pm - 3:30pm

Discussant: Owen Cornwall, MESAAS

Arthur Dudney, MESAAS, Columbia University
"Interdisciplinarity before Disciplines, the View from Early-Modern South Asia"

Irene Plantholt, Near Eastern Languages, Columbia University
"An interdisciplinary approach towards ancient Mesopotamian medicine"

3:30pm-3:45pm | Coffee

PANEL 4: Borders, Spaces, Disciplines
3:45pm - 5:15pm

Discussant: Yohann Ripert, Department of French and Romance Philology

Lori Cole, Department of Comparative Literature, NYU
"Reading Revista de Avance Across Disciplines"

Alvram Alpert, University of Pennsylvania
"Rousseau's Modernity and Suzuki's Zen"

Ginger Nolan, History of Architecture, Columbia University
"'Great Books for Fat Men' and Simple Tests for 'Savage Minds': How the Humanities Made a Global Humanity"

CONCLUDING PANEL:
5:15pm - 6:15pm

"On Institutionalizing Interdisciplinarity"

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor, Columbia University
Lydia Liu, Wu Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, EALAC, Columbia University

Moderated by Stathis Gourgouris, Professor of Classics and Director, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society

The ICLS Graduate Student Planning Committee would like to thank the following departments for their generous support: GSAC, GSAPP, EALAC, History, French and Romance Philology, MESAAS at Columbia University

For more information, please visit our website: icls.columbia.edu.

Upcoming Conference

Injured Cities, Urban Afterlives

Conference at Columbia University

October 14-15, 2011

Miller Theater and Wood Auditorium

See all program information at http://socialdifference.org/injuredcities/

This conference, convened on the tenth anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, aims to explore the effects of catastrophe on cities and their inhabitants, to analyze the politics of shock and terror states use in response to their vulnerability, and to imagine more life-affirming modes of redress and re-invention.

The focal point of the conference will be the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project of Columbia’s Oral History Research Office, an oral history archive of 600 life stories of diverse New York City communities. The collection documents the multiple ways that “difference” – in the form of geography, cultural memory, ethnic identity, class, gender, generation, religious and political affiliation – affects how individuals are subject to and assign meaning to historical catastrophe, both immediately after the event and in the months and years following.

The conference will begin with a morning panel that lays the groundwork for the discussions we hope to stimulate throughout the two days. Panel One, “Injured Cities/ Threshold Catastrophes” will address the temporality of urban catastrophe, looking both at the populations that are most vulnerable and most deeply affected by injury — those on the threshold of catastrophe, to borrow a term from Israeli theorist Ariella Azoulay — and at ‘wounded cities’ in the aftermath. Panelists are urban sociologist Saskia Sassen, cultural theorist Azoulay and cultural geographer Karen Till.

Injured Cities: Urban Afterlives seeks to initiate a new collective memory of the events of 9/11, 2001, that arises from the local and urban, but also the global experiences of those most directly – and differently – affected. The first afternoon will focus on a series of dialogues organized by Mary Marshall Clark (Director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office) that stage an encounter between oral history narrators who will testify to the crucial ways in which “difference” became a threat to the construction of a national collective memory of 9/11—a threat that endangered the national consensus that quickly formed for global retaliation. As a creative extension of the discussions of the opening day, the conference organizer are planning to host an evening performance of Testimony to the Ruins by the acclaimed Colombian theater group Mapa Teatro at Miller Theater.

Day Two of the conference will be organized around three interdisciplinary and international panels of noted artists, architects, scholars, journalists, and practitioners. Panel Four, “Citizens, Immigrants, Aliens in the Aftermath,” will think through the politics of belonging and unbelonging that result in the wake of catastrophic events, as well as the demographic injuries that fracture cities with potentially catastrophic effects. Panel Five, “Spatializing Afterlife” will engage the expressive cultural forms through which urban artists, planners, activists and policy-makers have engaged catastrophe, and how they have responded to their enduring wounds through the spatio-physical re-visioning of injured cities. The final panel “Art and Archive After Catastrophe” will focus on artistic responses to urban catastrophe, and the creative modalities that transform them into acts of redress and renewal.

Participants include Ariella Azoulay, Nina Bernstein, Teddy Cruz, Ann Jones, Dinh Q. Lê, Anne McClintock, Shirin Neshat, Walid Raad, Saskia Sassen, Karen Till, Clive van den Berg, Eyal Weizman and several narrators from the 9/11 Oral History Project; moderators Gerry Albarelli, Carol Becker, Hazel V. Carby, Tina Campt, Andreas Huyssen, Mary Marshall Clark, Saidiya Hartman, Rosalind Morris, Diana Taylor, and Mabel Wilson; and conference co-organizers Tina Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Lorie Novak, and Laura Wexler.

Interpretations: Exhibition Practice (Columbia Symposium, 4/22)

M.S. in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at GSAPP + Domus present:


INTERPRETATIONS: EXHIBITION PRACTICE
A daylong symposium at Columbia University that critically unpacks
the formative processes of recent architectural exhibitions.

Date: Friday 22 April, 2011, 11:00–18:00
Location: Wood Auditorium, Columbia University; New York, NY.
Free entrance


What is the purpose of architectural exhibitions? How are they produced?
It is widely recognized that exhibitions have been a fundamental platform for
the formulation, production, and dissemination of ideas within architecture;
and yet, the processes through which they are created often remain opaque.

Interpretations attempts to unpack specific examples of contemporary
architectural exhibitions, taking certain "reference exhibitions" as common
points of departure for a larger discussion about the complexities of
exhibition practice.

The symposium is structured around three exhibition categories, each
compromising one session: contextual, survey, and themed—using this
format as a tool to maintain a critically flexible, while still defined,
space for discussion.

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Program:

11:00
Opening remarks
Mark Wigley
Interpretations Curatorial Team

11:15
Keynote Lecture
Beatriz Colomina

12:00
Contextual
Kurt W. Forster
Commentary by: Joseph Grima and Ute Meta Bauer
Reference Exhibition: Ninth International Architecture Biennale in Venice.
Panel and Q&A moderated by Mark Wigley

13:30
Lunch Break

14:30
Survey
Barry Bergdoll
Commentary by: Keller Easterling and Damon Rich
Reference Exhibition: Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling.
Panel and Q&A moderated by Felicity D. Scott

16:00
Themed
Mirko Zardini
Commentary by: Sarah Herda and Tobi Maier
Reference Exhibition: Actions: What You Can Do With the City.
Panel and Q&A moderated by Mark Wasiuta

17:30
Closing remarks
Felicity D. Scott

17:45
Reception


Best regards,

Fernando Portal
Director de Diseño
Arquitecto, MArch.
+56.9.92382126

CO-OP
56 (02) 664-0379
Joel Rodríguez 941 B
Santiago – Chile
7500837

http://co-op.cl
http://reconstruye.org
http://pesquisa.cl
http://uro1.org

CFP: Places and Displacement: Grad Student Conference (Deadline 1/30)

Call for Papers

Places and Displacement:
A Graduate Student Conference

April 1, 2011

Graduate students are invited to submit proposals for the annual graduate student conference in international and global history, sponsored by the Columbia University Department of History and Center for International History, to take place at Columbia University in New York City on April 1, 2011.

This year’s conference will focus on the issues of place. Place indicates the intersection of communities and geography. It asks us to consider the meanings and attachments people assign a city, country, or region. A sense of place can give meaning to a location or community. It can also be conspicuous in its absence. We understand displacement broadly, not merely as the forced and voluntary movements of people.

Displacement encompasses the ways place can dissolve, the ways individuals and communities transcend places, and how culture, ideas, and technologies are reshaped as they move from place to place.

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

- places in imagination and memory
- cartographical interpretations of place
- refugees, stateless peoples, indigenous communities and displaced persons
- displacement and its effect on labor and market
- fashion, architecture, style and urban planning in relation to place
- colonial and post-colonial claims to place
- contact zones and borders
- gender and places
- religion and its effect on places
- place and the construction of race, nation and ethnicity

Specialists from Columbia University will provide commentary.

We see the conference as an opportunity to problematize place and examine its role in history and historiography. We welcome papers that explore the topic from either a theoretical, empirical, or methodological perspective or a combination of these approaches. We welcome submissions from all time periods and geographic regions that offer a transnational, international, or global approach to the conference theme. We encourage interdisciplinary research and, although proposals with a historical perspective are particularly welcome, we will also consider contributions from fields including but not limited to anthropology, economics, literature, philosophy, religious studies, political science, sociology, geography, law, architecture and urban planning, and public policy.
Limited funding for travel and assistance in arranging accommodation may be available.

Graduate students interested in participating should submit a paper abstract not exceeding 300 words and a recent CV not exceeding 2 pages as email attachments (Word or PDF) by January 30, 2011 to Gil Rubin and Anna Danziger, at cih.conference@gmail.com. Participants will be notified in February. Feel free to contact the conference coordinators, Aurélie Roy (aar2150@columbia.edu) or Mark Judd (maj2143@columbia.edu) for additional information about the conference.